2 Convicted of Killing Couple at Crack House : Violence: Separate juries find the half brothers guilty of first-degree murder. Police say they set the husband and wife on fire in a closet to cover up a robbery.

Juries found two half brothers guilty of first-degree murder Monday in the so-called “nightmare on Orange Grove” killings--the 1989 slayings of a couple set afire in a closet of a crack distribution house.

Jerome Martin, 25, and Lonnie Lewis, 32, also were found guilty of a string of other crimes, including the attempted murder of a woman who managed to flee the barricaded, burning closet at a home on Orange Grove Avenue in the Mid-City.

The woman’s escape was discovered by her attackers and she was shot twice; she survived by playing dead. The woman became the chief prosecution witness in Martin’s and Lewis’ six-week trial before separate juries, still showing scars from burns over 70% of her body.

Both men face the death penalty as a result of the convictions in the deaths of Lee Gottstein, 57, and his wife, Sylvia Davis, 45. The minimum sentence they can receive is life in prison without the possibility of parole.

“I’m very pleased,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Patricia Wilkinson said. “It’s been a long, hard case.”

Police believe that Gottstein and Davis were operating a wholesale cocaine distribution network out of their fourplex Spanish colonial home in a quiet, middle-class neighborhood.

Lewis and Martin, investigators believe, were low-level dealers in that operation and hoped to rob it and cover their tracks with the fire.

Both defendants contended that they were not at the scene.

Martin’s jury deliberated for more than eight days and Lewis’ jury deliberated for five. The panels, however, returned nearly identical guilty verdicts on all charges within hours of each other.

Superior Court Judge Florence-Marie Cooper ordered the jurors not to talk about the case to anyone until the end of the penalty phase of the trial, in which they will recommend sentences.

The defense lawyers conceded that the jurors must have believed the testimony of the survivor.

“I’m surprised they found him guilty of rape,” said Martin’s lawyer, Michael Yamamoto, who noted that the survivor acknowledged that she could not see the person who committed the assault.

Joel Isaacson, Lewis’ lawyer, had contended that the survivor and a third man--who was acquitted earlier--were the people who had tried to rob Gottstein and Davis.

But he could not explain how, if the woman was one of the culprits, she had been burned and shot.